Update on upgrades

We have been testing upgraded new e-mail and community administrative software on a clone of the site for the past couple of weeks, and everything is looking good. The upgrades will happen in two parts - first the e-mail (gossamer mail) probably sometime in the next two weeks, to be followed by the Forum stuff (some of which has already been upgraded in the background), probably in late August.

In addition, Gossamer is about to upgrade our server to a giant: Dual Opterons (state of the art) with 73 gig SCSI drives no less, and 4 gigs of RAM. The chief techie says "it's going to be a Ferrari compared to the Mercedes we were on previously, and will make the site even more responsive than it already is."

This change of server will necessitate about 10 to 15 minutes of downtime on Saturday (July 22).